Meet Bea Qian | Cinematic Artist & Narrative Designer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Bea Qian and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Bea, what role has risk played in your life or career?
I’ve always been a risk-taker throughout my creative journey. I’ve been making films since my middle school years, it has always been my favorite way of creating art and expressing my thoughts. But in the last year of high school, after a 6-year longing to attend a film school, I switched my passion to animation. It has been a difficult journey ever since: it’s very late to prepare for my university application, even though I haven’t spent my last few years learning and practicing my animation skills like what I did in films, I still want to go to a good school to learn from the best. It was a considerable risk for me considering I’ve always wanted to achieve things at a younger age, I always think there’s not much time left for me. I crunched for several months to give the best of myself into my university application, and I figured out to combine my skills and experience in film with my fresh passion and understanding of animation. It was not an easy time for me, and I thought things would get better in college. Turns out, they didn’t. My beginning years at ArtCenter College of Design weren’t easy at all, and here I am, continuing my crunch til the end of graduation. Trying to enter the entertainment industry these days is a huge risk in career choices too. And that’s how I started to realize, that if I could overcome these challenges, I can overcome everything. Risks are avoidable if you don’t want to face them directly. And the clever mindsets go both ways: pivoting before the risk becomes an unavoidable disaster is a smart move, or finding a way to achieve what you’ve wanted by directly facing the risk and overcoming the difficulties. These are my strategies, depending on the situation and what cards do I have left.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’ve always been a big fan of storytelling. Since I was a kid, I would stand in the living room and try to retell the stories I’ve heard in the audiobook or educational CDs my parents played to me. Cinematic storytelling was the first media of storytelling I got into, but never the last. For a long time in my life, I studied the great filmmakers and explored different ways to tell stories through a lens. One thing that I always remember sparked my journey being a storyteller, is how much I love to hear the protagonist’s soliloquy about their takeaways by the end of a film, after a movie-length of stories. The sounds of uplifting music, a calm-read dialogue, a montage of the resolution of the protagonist, and every other thing in the film. This was my motivation. I had an urge to create such a sequence like this when I just started making a film back in middle school. This was my start. Then I quickly discovered that this kind of sequence is more powerful after a longer length of storytelling, and by that I mean, like a video game with 20-hour gameplay. So I was always a big fan of the cinematic cutscenes in video games too.

I made films for a good 5-6 years in my youth age. I had some solid achievements, and I also went to Chapman University’s famous Dodge College for a good summer academy time. But that was the period when I was a little bit distracted by some other opportunities in life. In my last year of high school, I was very good in Biology and had a large passion for literature and philosophy too. I also considered that if I wanted to be a writer. Then, another spark showed up in my life – animation. It’s a brand new media that I’ve always come across with, but never lean forward to learn more about. Along with another thing that I loved during my filmmaking times: storyboarding. I have liked to draw since I was a kid, but I never trained in any kind of art class. Now that I think about it, I was a little bit blinded by the heat of learning a new thing, and I made a risky choice of changing the major that I wanted to apply to in college.

During my college years, I learned tons of practical skills in animation, specifically about CGI, because all I did before college was 2D stuff. CG was another world. I see more potential in storytelling, and I see the future. I never stopped learning, and I became good at cameras in 3D, good enough to give me a job after college. At the same time, I continued developing my filmmaking skills with storyboarding and directing my capstone film. It’s just like making a film, I still need to compromise a lot on schedules, and I need to give directions to the animators about the character’s acting. I also started to do little video projects, most of the time completely by myself, just exploring different ways of storytelling in a short length of the video, and instead of using live-action footage as I’ve always done before college, I started to do animation instead.

Now, after a 4-year of learning CGI technology and animation in general, I begin to be not satisfied with my current media of storytelling again. I love animation, as well as live-action filmmaking, but there’s a media with the future of storytelling: GAME. The game and animation industries always come across to each other, because of the similar technology and skills required for making both of them. But besides the animation skill that allowed me to work in the game industry already, I started to write my own games as well. I’m transitioning myself to not only being a cinematic and storyboard artist but also a narrative designer. Currently, I’m working on an unannounced AAA sci-fi game as a narrative design intern, seeking to build more experience and create good stories out of a different media again.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I had a couple of experiences like this before. LA is a great place with loads of famous places to go. One of my favorite places to check out is the Griffith Observatory, it’s a beautiful, romantic place and I’m a big fan of astronomy. I always take my friends for a drive across Sunset Boulevard, all the cool Hollywood places, but we don’t park and walk – just for a little drive. If my friends want to see the beach, I will choose between the Santa Monica Pier and the Venice beach. We probably will visit the Burbank area, passing by the Disney Animation Studio building and some of the Warner Brother’s places. Then take a visit to my favorite hobby shop – Burbank’s House of Hobbies.

For my favorite food places – as a Chinese, I love Mr. Champion at the Las Tunas Dr. for some great Cantonese food. It’s the best I’ve ever had here.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Certainly! First of all, I would like to thank my parents for giving me the support to chase my dream and become the person I wanted to be. They always respect my ideas and encourage me to create my own art. Secondly, I’d love to shoutout to all the great teachers I’ve met, back the very first computer teacher in primary school who taught me how to edit videos, to my art teacher in high school, Mr Adam Knight, who trusted me on my coursework in the A-level Digital Media and Design class and I eventually scored the highest mark in the world. My great mentors in college, Terry Meows, Alan Wan, Dirk Valk, and Paul Taylor, were the highlights of my learning journey at ArtCenter studying animation. I’ve learned tons from them. And I want to thank all my friends who have been a part of my filmmaking life, we made films together, super cringe acting skills but still we had a lot of fun. When I got to college and directed my capstone film, I felt like I had been doing this forever. Leading a production is always a pain, but we met tiny happiness throughout our journey and we will have a big rewarding moment at the end. Last but not least, onto my career, I’d like to thank Tim Dean and Jess Jenkins at Turn 10 Studios, Microsoft for picking me up in ArtCenter and giving me the opportunity to work on one of my favorite racing franchises, Forza.

Website: www.beaqian.art

Instagram: @beaqian_art

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chen-q-a061511a7/

Youtube: www.youtube.com/@beaqian1398

Image Credits
Matte Painter: Amber Wang Art Direction: Linka Guo Associate Art Director: Doma Wang